Home Is Where The Heart Is
by Tolakasa
Summary: Preseries AU.  An unexpected death can bring families closer, or tear them apart.  John Winchester learned that a long, long time ago.


**Home Is Where the Heart Is**

Nothing made John Winchester's skin crawl like the hollow metallic-clean smell of a hospital, a gut reaction born of forced visits to his dying grandfather, exacerbated by months of recovery in various military hospitals and a thousand nights in emergency rooms since Mary's death. Nursing homes were a thousand times worse, as if pain and despair and imminent death had stinks of their own to compound with the stench of antiseptics and illness and age.

And loneliness. The more alert patients in the halls gave him dirty, desperate looks, a combination of fear that he might be there for them, and fear that he might not. Patients with families were not abandoned to sit in the halls.

He finally found a nurse's station that wasn't empty. "I'm looking for Claire Winchester's room."

The nurse looked up from a stack of charts a foot high and gave him the cranky glare of the terminally overworked. "Who's asking?"

"I—" He hesitated. He'd conned his way through everything from hospitals to federal offices in the last twenty years, and now, of all things, a fucking _nursing home_ made him nervous. "I'm her son. John."

The woman frowned. "Mrs. Winchester doesn't have any sons. None living."

He'd known that was coming, but he flinched anyway. "Is one of the girls here? They'll vouch for me." Any of his sisters would, even Jackie, and the last words they'd exchanged had been hot enough to make the entire Navy blush, mainly because she'd tried to talk him into abandoning his boys to foster care and wouldn't even offer to take care of them herself. But she wouldn't try to keep him away from their mother. Not now.

"I can't leave my post to hunt her kids down," the woman grumbled.

John swore under his breath. "Isn't there an approved visitors list or something?" he asked. The fake IDs wouldn't work, not for this; they'd only raise more questions than they answered. And if it was Jackie or Debbie on watch, it'd _really_ land his ass in the fire. Cathy would understand, Annie or Nancy wouldn't care one way or the other, but Jackie and Debbie... Well, they hadn't approved of anything he'd done since before Dean was born. Debbie was still pissed off at him for marrying Mary.

The nurse grumbled some more, but rolled her chair over to the files and pulled one out. "Visitors, visitors, where is the visitors—here it is," she said, pulling out a sheet of purple paper. Either they color-coded the things or some idiot had let Annie type it up. "Debbie, Anne, Cathleen— John Winchester?" He nodded. "Well, there's one on here, but the relationship's not listed. I thought it was one of the grandchildren." He managed not to laugh. Nobody in their family would name a kid _John_. Or _Mark_. And he was pretty sure that the only _Sam_ was his. "Room 178. That way, first right, all the way on the end."

The doors had numbers and nameplates, so when he found 178, the tiny card that said _Claire Winchester_ confirmed that it was his mother's room. There was only the one name on the door; Dad had left enough money to make sure she was comfortably taken care of. Not that she'd been in any condition to notice—

_Not her fault_.

_Quit defending her, John._ He heard Mary's voice as clear as if she stood beside him, and couldn't keep back a sad smile. Mary had refused to play along with his family's private mindgame from the start, from the first time he took her home to meet his family, when she'd first learned about Sam's death and his mother's subsequent condition, to just before Dean was born and she'd put her foot down and they had cut off contact with everybody but Cathy—still accepting their calls, their visits, their cards, but no longer attending the family gatherings, doing nothing that would put them in contact with John's parents. Of his siblings, only Cathy and Mark had supported the decision—Cathy as much because she and Mary were friends as because he was her favorite brother, and Mark because he was the only other one who knew what it was like to be a son in that house after Sam died.

_The road was dark and gritty with slush and Mary didn't seem to care that keeping the Impala on the road was taking all his attention, or that it was Christmas Eve and they'd just left his parents' house two _days_ ahead of schedule, or that she was eight months along and this kind of temper tantrum wasn't at all good for the baby. "No, John. I know she's your mother and you love her, but I'm not going to spend every Christmas and Easter and Mother's Day and birthday sitting there watching her go on and on about Sam like you and Mark never even existed! I'm not watching anybody hurt you like that."_

_"It doesn't—"_

_"Don't lie to me, John, I can _see_ how much it hurts you!"_

_"She doesn't know—"_

_"That just makes it worse! Your family's never even _tried_ to get her any help! They've as much as said that nobody in that family matters because Sam's dead! Even your father won't acknowledge you when she's in the room! Jesus Christ, John, he _quit talking to you_ when she came back from the kitchen! Like you don't matter at all!"_

_"She's his wife—"_

_"And you're his son! Just because she let her life stop when Sam died doesn't mean he has to play along! Goddammit, John, what's going to happen to our kids? How is she going to treat them when she insists that you died in Vietnam when you're standing right in front of her? Is this baby even going to _exist_ for her?" Her voice softened. "John, do you want to explain to your child why Grandma won't hold him or hug him or even remember his name?"_

He knocked, as quietly as he could and still have it heard inside; the last thing he wanted was to disturb the other residents. There was no answer, and eventually he dared to push the door open—slowly, in case the room's occupant was asleep.

It was spare and institutional, a hospital room with wooden paneling and checkerboard tile rather than white-on-white. Someone had tried to soften the harshness of the room with lace-trimmed curtains, an old quilt spread over the hospital bed, and pictures—pictures _everywhere_, in frames and loose, tacked to corkboards and walls and even a few hung properly. Pictures of his sisters and their children and their grandchildren—and Sam. His dead brother stared out at him from every wall, from toddlerhood to college and every age in between—every picture of Sam their parents had ever taken.

John had to search to find himself in the wallpaper of pictures, and then only twice: a picture from his wedding that had probably only made it because all his sisters had been bridesmaids, and the family portrait. That was the only place he saw Mark, either. No wonder the nurses thought they were as dead as Sam.

The last family portrait—the one done just before Sam's death, right before John left for the Marines—had been hung on the wall facing the bed, where his mother could see it when she woke. He and Sam and Jacquelyn, the three oldest, stood behind their parents; Mark sat squeezed between them; and the four younger girls—Anne, Deborah, Nancy, Cathleen—knelt in front. They looked like a normal family.

_We were. Then._

Then Sam had died—a stupid, _stupid_ accident, a college party gone bad, and the grief had cracked their mother's mind. John had come home to find a mother who wouldn't acknowledge his existence. Unable to face the death of her favorite son, she'd turned the news of John's wound to a report of death and completely blocked all memories of Mark from her mind. She didn't even recognize them.

The girls had been lucky. They had only lost a brother. It had made them careful, though, careful not to upset their mother, not to remind her of Sam or disturb her long-winded recollections—and nothing upset her more than implying that there were two other boys in the Winchester family.

John closed his eyes against the onslaught of memories—the worst memories in his life, up to the day Mary died, including Vietnam—and slipped inside, closing the door behind him.

The woman lying in the bed was small and frail and wasted away, so much smaller than he remembered; he'd gotten taller than she was before he was thirteen, but she'd never been so—so _fragile_. Not even in those horrible months right after he came home, when she was still reeling in shock from Sam's death and had to be forced to eat. He'd seen her a handful of times these past three decades, and she'd never looked this bad, not even after Dad died.

"Mama?" he asked softly, touching her arm. Her eyes fluttered open, revealing irises filmed with white. Cataracts. Grandma had had them too. "It's me, Mama, it's Johnny."

"Johnny?" She shook her head. "Johnny's dead. Died in the war."

"No, Mama," he replied patiently, trying to ignore the sudden stinging in his eyes. "I was just hurt." How many hours had he spent pleading with her to remember him? How many years? The old wound in his leg, the one from the war, ached dully, a phantom pain that no amount of hunting ever wakened. Only the memories could do that.

"Died in the war," she repeated distantly, as if she hadn't heard him. "Lost him and my Sammy, all in the same year... My poor little boy..." She drifted back into sleep.

John's hands clenched on the cold metal railing of the bed. Poor little Sammy. _Always_ poor little Sammy. Never a thought for poor little Johnny, who at least had gotten injured serving his goddamned country, not hurling himself headfirst into a shallow fountain in a drunken stupor. No thoughts for poor little Mark, who had effectively lost his whole family at sixteen and thrown himself into drinking and drugs and women and anything else that promised just a moment of peace. No, it was grief for Sam that made her starve herself or sink into depression or even, once, try to kill herself. Grief for Sam that made the whole family tiptoe around the subject of John and Mark, welcome them only when Mama couldn't see, couldn't hear. Don't upset Mama, don't make her face reality, nobody admit that maybe, just _maybe_, John and Mark hurt too—

"Hey!" a voice said behind him. He whirled around. "What are you—" Cathy skidded to a stop in the doorway. "Oh my God. _Johnny?_" She hurled herself at him, wrapping him in a fierce hug that belied her small size. "You came—oh, _God_, Johnny, I can't believe you came—"

"I thought I was invited," he teased, and she hit him in the arm (hard) and squeezed him tighter.

"I know, but I didn't think you'd actually come _here_," she said, finally letting go. "When Dad died, you just showed up at the funeral."

"I didn't want to upset her." If the First Rule with his boys was _do what we do and don't tell anybody_, the First Rule of his family was _don't upset Mama._

"Story of our life, huh?" she asked with a sardonic little grin. "Come on, over here." She tugged him towards the window and the chair that sat there. "She drifts in and out," Cathy added. "I don't think she knows any of us anymore. Let alone—"

"Yeah." He collapsed into the chair by the window. It looked out into the garden, a very nicely kept one. Dad had known what he was doing when he picked this place. Mama had always loved her roses, nearly as much as she'd loved Sam and the girls.

Cathy lowered herself to the floor beside his chair, moving with the flexibility of a much younger woman. "I really didn't think you'd come. Mark wouldn't, even though the bishop said he could have time off."

He had to smile at that; little hell-raiser Mark, that lost young man, grown up into a priest—a quirk of fate made even more amusing by Dean's strong resemblance to the uncle he'd never met. "Maybe I shouldn't have either."

"She's still your mother."

He snorted. "Is she? She thinks I've been dead for thirty years."

"But you're not."

"Kitty-cat—" How long had it been since he'd used that nickname? "I—"

She leaned against his knee, the way she had back when she was a teenager and he was just learning to walk again and hiding in his room to avoid their siblings and the pain of a mother who looked past him as if he wasn't even there. She hadn't left him alone then, even when the rest of the family was lost in their grief; she'd saved him from disappearing into a depression that would have ended worse than their mother's. "Mary was right, Johnny," she said softly. "Mary was _exactly_ right. You did the best thing you ever could have by cutting them out of your lives. Dean and Sammy deserved better grandparents."

"_Cathy!_" he hissed, shooting a worried look at the bed.

"She's not going to start understanding _now_," she pointed out dryly. "How are the boys? I'm guessing you didn't bring them."

He shook his head. "Dean's in Montana on a job. Sammy—" He hesitated, bracing for a reaction that was sure to be bad. "He got accepted to Stanford. Full ride."

"And you wouldn't let him go so he stormed out of the house and you haven't spoken since. _Johnny_," she groaned.

"What was I supposed to do?"

"Let him live his life?" she suggested dryly. He glared at her. "Johnny, I know how it is. I know how you never want them to leave. But you've got to. It's the price of having kids in the first place, knowing that if you do your job someday they'll find their own way."

"He's not safe."

"At _Stanford?_ Shit, Johnny, Maria went to the University of _Texas_. Do you know how much booze that campus goes through in a week? Sammy's _way_ safer than she is." He chuckled. "Where did you tell them you were going?"

"Told Dean I had a job." That had been a week ago, but he wasn't going to tell her that. Cathy had a small notion of what he did, but he tended to keep the finer details to himself, just out of habit.

"You're letting Dean work his own jobs now?"

"The boy's twenty-six."

"Which makes Sammy twenty-two, and you were just complaining that he ran off to college without you," she pointed out dryly. He mock-growled at her. "You got a place to stay?"

He shook his head. "Just got in. Figured I'd get—"

But Cathy was already digging a cellphone out of her pocket. "Me and Dee have plenty of room, and Jackie knows better than to come storming into _my_ house causing trouble."

"Cathy—" She was already punching a number into the phone. "_Cathleen_—"

"Hey, hon," she said into the phone, completely ignoring him, "Johnny's here, I'm sending him to the house, make sure the toys are picked up in the guest room, okay? What?" She frowned and looked up at him. "You got anything against _paella?_ Dee's been doing the cooking—"

"Kitty-cat—"

"On second thought, Dee, he used to be allergic to shrimp. Better not, unless you made veggie."

"_Cathy!_"

"I know what kind of shitholes you normally stay in, Johnny," she snapped, "and if you think I'm letting you, you've got another thing coming."

He sighed. "If every little sister on the planet is annoying as you, kitty-cat, it's amazing that any of you survive to adulthood."

She gave him a grin. "It's because all the big brothers are overprotective."

* * *

Dinner with Cathy and his brother-in-law Diego was a taste of the warmth he hadn't had in years, a taste of the normality that he'd turned his back on so long ago; he'd found bits of it sometimes, at the Roadhouse before Bill died, on the rare occasions when he and the boys could relax, but never anything as warm and comfortable as _real_ family. His boys wouldn't have recognized him, sitting at the kitchen table with a beer and a meal of Spanish stuff he couldn't even pronounce and laughing over things that had happened before they were born. 

But in the Winchester family, there was no avoiding tragedy; Sam and their mother, Mary, Cathy and Dee's daughter who had died of SIDS. "You should have stayed with us," Dee rumbled, when the night was old and they were all tipsy enough to not get angry with each other. "Given those boys a home."

"Nah," Cathy said before John could summon an angry answer. "Home is where the heart is, and their hearts are with their daddy." She smiled. "And his is with them."

* * *

Claire Madison Winchester died that night, in her sleep. The phone woke him—Annie calling, letting them know. John met Cathy in the hall, and knew from the look on her face that it was over. 

His sister was grieving, but he felt no pain, no shock, not even relief. No emotion at all, just a thought: _I hope she finds Sam now._ Mary had believed in Heaven, and that was the only blessing he could give his mother.

Mark was right. She had died a long time ago.

* * *

The graveside service was as small as it could be, considering that every one of his sisters had at least four kids and half of those kids had started having their own by now. Halfway through it, John's phone started vibrating. He reached into his pocket and shut it off, letting it go to voicemail. Probably Dean, calling to check in. He'd called twice yesterday, but both times had been in the middle of family meetings and the double-barreled glare from Jackie and Debbie had been enough to make John ignore the calls. 

He stood by the grave while his sisters and the rest of the family drifted off, to the wake to be held at Nancy's place. He had no intentions of going, of spending the rest of the afternoon being stared at by nieces and nephews who didn't remember him or Mary or their cousins but knew every detail of Sam's life.

He retreated to the truck eventually, letting the cemetery workers do their jobs, and finally checked his messages. One from Bobby, one from Ellen (which he promptly deleted), two from Joshua, three from Jim Murphy, and one from Caleb. Not counting the five from Dean.

"Hey, Dad, it's Dean. Just letting you know the job went okay, no problems. I got wind of a job in New Orleans, so I'm headed that way, let me know if you've got something different you want me to do."

John snapped the phone shut and stuffed it into his pocket, then leaned against the truck, staring at the mound of flowers covering his mother's grave. The boys had never even known her, or their grandfather, or their aunts and uncle and cousins. They should have. They should have had that support, should have had a place to go when things got rough.

There was a smaller stone beside his parents', nearly forty years old now; he knew what it said by memory, memory that no amount of tragedy and hunting had ever been able to erase: _Samuel Winchester, beloved son and brother._

Mary had fought naming either of their children for him. She'd succeeded with Dean, but by the time Sammy came along, with four years of separation from his family easing the hurt, John had out-stubborned her. The name wasn't an exact match—his brother had had no middle name, and his son did—but it was something, some small way of memorializing the years when he'd had both a brother and a mother.

Dean and Sammy didn't know any of this. Probably never would. The only way they _could_ know was if he told them. They hadn't even seen Cathy since—hell, since Mary's funeral. If Dean remembered her at all, he'd be surprised.

Would it have made a difference? If they'd had a support network—if _he'd_ had a support network, if he'd known Diego's mother was a psychic and a _bruja_ and that he could be honest with his brother-in-law about what he'd seen, if he'd just realized that Cathy would have listened no matter what... Would it have changed anything?

The phone rang again. "Winchester."

"Hey, John, it's Mack. Got something you might be interested in."

"Talk to me," he said, and climbed into the truck and left home behind for the last time.

_**the end**_


End file.
